Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Category Management Series: New Technologies To Revolutionize Merchandizing (2)

There was another part of merchandizing I wanted to discuss about in my previous post, but that was discussed only briefly at the IFM: Online Merchandizing. To be more precise, Drive Merchandizing.

Indeed, Drive thru grocery retailing will soon account for 8 to 10% of the global market. And it is constantly growing. And yet, a lot of opportunities are not leveraged so far:
  • Cross merchandizing: You have a lot of opportunities to cross merchandise items that you could not do in the real world. For example: milk. You can't place it in a real store at two places, even though placing it near cereals make as much sense as placing it in the cooking section. You can have several cross merchandizing strategy for a same section online.
  • Enriched content: In store, you may have limited information about the usage of one product. For products such as stews, you may have video to advice you which receipes to make with.
  • You may test more depending on the shopper behavior: you have history purchases so you may display the categories differently to try to have the most efficient merchandizing strategy.
  • You may adapt to your local area, with for example specific offers, depending on the local store activities.
  • Work on the different screens: You should adapt to smartphones, tablets, or even other screens to provide a great shopping experience. Maybe there will be different merchandizing strategies.
  • Extra activities to develop: Why would there be no hardware on drive thru somedays? 
So a lot of things can happen also on this.